We haven’t had a political sex scandal for a very long time,
by which I mean at least a few months. For a while there they were as regular
as rain. And just as regular was the whole way they played themselves out –
beginning with the adamant denials, continuing with the exposure of the truth,
proceeding to the press conference apology which is nearly simultaneous with
the twitter and talking-head analysis, and then by the late-night comedy riffs,
and ending either by the fade in to obscurity, or sometimes, by the attempted
comeback and then the fade.

In recent times those press conference apologies have seemed
both more generic and more intimate. It’s pretty clear that public relations firms
have focus-grouped various phrases and produced a handy formula to improve your
chances of raising a sympathetic response from the American public. You have to
say, “Most of all I have hurt my wife and my family,” (because most often you
are a heterosexual married male) and make reference to “time to heal,” and you
have to use the words, “actions for which I take full responsibility,” even if
your actions thus far have made it clear to everyone that the very last thing
you ever intend to do is take any responsibility whatsoever, and that you are
only standing here now in a last ditch attempt to salvage something. The public
relations firms will tell you how to stand, and how to look, and what suit and
tie to wear. As important, they will tell your wife that she has to be there
too, and they will tell her what to wear, how to stand, and the right kind of
pained yet supportive look to mold her face in to.

Let’s just consider for a moment that some of them really
meant what they said. Let’s just posit that some of them were indeed truly
chastened through and through. The problem is, of course, that it’s almost
impossible to tell the real penitents from the fakers. On the one hand, the
political handlers have become so adept at teaching their clients how to mimic
remorse that even the most recalcitrant can give a convincing performance. On
the other hand, we the public have become so jaded, and in no small part
because the handlers and PR people have so consistently manipulated us, that we
err on the side of discounting all of them. It’s as though from overuse and
abuse our bs detectors have gotten jammed in the on position.

These public sex scandals make all of us feel a little
tainted, not just because there is nothing anymore that is left out, with
absolutely every last detail of every last graphic act being uncovered and
described, but also because we are made to be complicit in the media frenzy.
They leave us feeling depressed, dirty and, more than anything, exasperated over
the time and resources that are being sucked away from dealing with the very
real and very serious problems in front of us.

If David had been a politician in 21st Century
America and not a politician in Ancient Israel, perhaps he would have followed
down the same dismal path. Perhaps he would have stood in front of the camera
shutters and the scrim of reporters with his wives in a row behind him looking
grim and determined. Perhaps he would have begun by saying that he had let down
the American people, and that now he needed time with his family and time to
heal. Perhaps he would have told us that he accepted full responsibility for
his actions, even as his lawyers were drawing up the briefs that would shield
him from paying for his actions in any serious way.

There were political handlers and public relations
specialists in David’s time, they were officials of the court, and faith has
convinced me that there are still prophets like the prophet Nathan around
today. Sadly for us, we rarely hear about those prophets now. But fortunately
for us, we have this instance preserved for us in which the prophet reached the
political official before the handlers did.

In Psalm 51, we encounter something wholly different than
what we have become accustomed to. Here is the real thing. Here is unflinching,
abject penitence. You get the sense that if this David had stood in front of
the TV cameras and spoken the words of this Psalm, the pain of it would make us
look away, or squirm under the burden of the hearing of it.

The Bible is many things to us, the Word of Life, a guide, a
source book of faith and hope. But it’s also, in places, downright interesting.
Especially in the Hebrew Scriptures, there is a parade of characters who
haven’t in any way been cleaned up for us. We find them with all their faults and
flaws and bad behavior on full display. Chief among the flawed and the faulty
is David.

I hear that the PW women, when discussing this text,
enumerated all the commandments David busted through, with coveting, adultery,
and murder topping the list.

Among the other benefits Scripture gives us, it plunges us
in to the real. Take any of the apologies offered by philandering politicians
and stack it up against Psalm 51. The first will leave you feeling empty and a
little sullied. In the other, you will feel the pain as real and deep now as it
was three thousand years ago. Here is a man facing the full horror of what he
has done. Here is a man utterly convinced of his need for grace.

In my own life, the other place where I have found this same
penitential spirit is in Alcoholics Anonymous. I’m sure that any of you who are
a part of a 12 step program know what I am talking about.

When I first dragged my sorry self to AA, what struck me
through the haze of my own confusion was how much like church it was. In fact,
it often seemed more like church than church did.

It had many of the same components. There were prayers,
there was a liturgy of sorts, and there was testimony about the goodness of
God. There was even a passing of the hat.

It struck me too, that in many ways, AA was more successful than
many of our churches. There’s no paid staff, no buildings, and no proselytizing.
Still people come, and then they come back. They learn about God there, and
also about the rigors of a spiritual practice.

As a church person, I’ve often wondered what we could learn
from the 12 step model. I think that one critical difference is that 12 step
programs have a higher threshold of membership, which gives them a kind of edge.
It’s a place that you go when you’ve exhausted all your other options.

What if we only came to church after we had hit rock bottom.
What if we put a sign out front that said, “Come back when you’re ready.” The
good news is that we get to come here any time. The hard news is that it will
be a great temptation to avoid coming to terms with repentance. The great thing
that we addicts have over the civilians is that we get the clear and simple
choice between facing ourselves or death. It helps to concentrate the mind.

Consider the great swath of destruction that David created
before facing his own sin. A woman raped, a man dead, and no end of lives
ruined. David yielded to the same tendency toward denial that is in all of us,
and pretended that the pain wasn’t real. The luxury of being king, with all
those resources at your disposal, and sycophants to tell you only what you want
to hear, is that you get to pretend a little longer. The horror of being king,
with all those resources and lying officials is that your pretending will have far
reaching and calamitous consequences.

At the least, David’s story reminds us that we each have
within us the capacity to be a total jerk. It’s part of our human nature to
indulge in elaborate schemes of self-deception, to be enthralled by power, or
greed or obsession. Or, to put it more simply, the hard part about life is that
we will hurt one another. The knowledge of that fills us with fear and shame
and sadness. We’d rather do anything other than come up against that one hard
truth, but there it is.

We sometimes squander the resources given to us, we fail to
cherish and care for the earth that is our home, we don’t acknowledge the ways
in which the choices that we make limit those of others, and we don’t always do
right by one another. We don’t do these things because we are bad people, we do
them because we are people. We bear the burden and the blessing of being born
with the capacity to love. With love comes vulnerability, and with
vulnerability comes fear. It’s all part of the deal.

By the grace of God, David had Nathan in his life, and by
the grace of God, David listened when the prophet laid out the truth to him.
Then the full force of what he had done hit him, and hit him hard. It was a
truth too great for bearing. When David finally stopped running from himself
and from facing the truth of what he had done, he was at last driven in to
prayer.

God’s grace was sufficient for David, and God’s grace is
sufficient for us too. Grace makes penitence possible and not simply
overwhelming, and grace not only makes penitence possible, it makes penitence
liberating.

Church gives us the chance to feel again our own desire to
live in accordance with love. Church is that place which grounds us once again
in what is real, even when what is real and what is hard are the same. Church
gives us a community of prophets and sinners to learn with and from. Church
calls us to lay our hearts on the altar, and to trust in a God who knows us and
who alone has the power to set us once again on the path of love.

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